After the 24-year-old television reporter Alison Parker and her 27-year-old cameraman Adam Ward were killed while on camera from a lake outside of Roanoke, Virginia on Wednesday morning, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, somewhat predictably tweeted that “[w]e must act to stop gun violence, and we cannot wait any longer” and Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe called for new gun control measures in the form of background checks. The conservative response to Democrats’ anodyne reactions is even more predictable: It’s wrong, they say, to “politicise” individual acts of firearm violence. But gun violence in the United States has everything to do with politics — and we should be talking more, not less, about the impact of America’s failed gun policies on victims and their families and communities.
It is true — as apologists for the status quo will be sure to point out — that it is impossible to know whether today’s murder specifically could have been prevented by a more stringent gun control regime, let alone by one characterized exclusively by background checks.
But on a more systematic level, the result of our lack of substantive, internationally comparable gun control is entirely clear: The US is not only an international outlier in its lack of gun control, it is also a massive outlier in terms of firearm violence. The ease of access to firearms clearly causes large numbers of unnecessary deaths by homicide, suicide, and accident.
Thus, the staggering human toll of gun violence in the US is not just a random coincidence; it is the result of political choices. Policies that could reduce the huge number of mass killings in the US are not a mystery: After 35 people were killed in Tasmania in 1996, Australia’s conservative government enacted sweeping gun control measures.
The result was that both homicides and suicides by gun were immediately and sharply reduced and there have been no mass killings in the country since. Conversely, there have been 885 mass killings in the United States since December 2012, when a gunman killed 20 elementary school students at the Newtown Elementary School in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
Identifying the policy changes that could reduce American firearm slaughter is easy, of course — and figuring out a politically viable way of getting these policies enacted is another matter. Even if the 2008 Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v Heller declaring an individual right to bear arms in the 2nd Amendment were to be overruled by the same court, the political obstacles in the path of meaningful gun control are formidable. Isolated state and local measures are not meaningless, but there are distinct limits to how much they can accomplish.
Tough federal gun control measures could make a big difference, but passing any such measure through both the House and a Senate that massively over-represents small, rural states with a disproportionate number of gun-owners would be impossible for the foreseeable future.
The lack of congressional reaction to the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 is instructive on that point. Even very modest, overwhelmingly popular gun control measures, involving background checks and controls on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, failed to pass a Democratic Senate and, even if they had, they would have had no chance of passing the House of Representatives.
Australian-style gun control is not coming to the US anytime soon, especially with support for gun rights only growing.
But gun control is not the only way to address gun violence and Parker and Ward are not even its typical victims. Even if Parker and Ward’s killer had not turned his gun on himself, there would have been an intensive investigation into their deaths, and the sure-to-have-been apprehended killer would have faced some measure of justice. Consider, though, the situation 280 miles (450km) northeast of Roanoke in Baltimore, Maryland.
The horrifying death of Freddie Gray in police custody has highlighted the violence committed by police against Baltimore’s African-American citizens, but what the police have failed to do for the community is also important to understanding how gun violence typically plays out in America. So far in 2015, more people have been killed in Baltimore (population 620,000) than in New York City (population 8.4 million).
The more than 200 murder victims in Baltimore receive much less attention from either the investigating authorities or the media, and the vast majority of those victims are poor and African-American. Indeed, the horrifying spike in homicides has been met with a weak response by the police: the clearance rate for murders is less than 40 per cent.
A lack of federal gun control is certainly a large part of the problem of the toll of gun violence. But other policies and social conditions — most obviously high levels of economic and racial inequality — also play a major role, and both are also the result of political choices.
As the journalist Jill Leovy explains in her new book Ghettoside, poor African-American communities in many American urban areas are simultaneously over and under-policed: They are on the one hand subject to routine harassment, detention and imprisonment for minor offenses but, when it comes to serious violent offences committed against poor African-Americans, the reaction by the state and the media is too often apathetic or ineffectual.
Most victims of gun violence will never make international news, and their deaths will almost never result in calls for more gun control — let alone the kind of gun control that would reduce the number of guns in the hands of Americans, which is the only tried-and-true method for reducing gun violence.
The American epidemic of gun violence has not been “politicised” by those who seek to alleviate it. It is and always has been an inherently political question, as is what Americans are going to do about it. The answer, at least for now, seems to be “nothing”. But it does not always have to be.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
